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How do you tell your dinner party host you’re now a vegan? Hint: There’s only one correct way

CB

By Cathrin BradburyStarMetro

Fri., Nov. 2, 2018timer11 min. read

“I’m thinking of writing about going vegan,” I said to a good pal.

“I think you should,” he said in a sweet, singsong voice. “Because then you can tell everyone what a drip you’ve become.”

I’d like to say that this is a rare response, that most people take to my vegan news with delight and curiosity. But no. If you want to do something contentious this holiday season, if you want to make dinner guests act as crazy as Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearing, tell your longtime friends you are now a vegan.

I’m in my fourth month, and plan to quit after my sixth, in January. My motivation for starting out was not super honourable. I like to get a jump on things, trend-wise, and veganism is suddenly deeply cool. What began as a hardline animal activism movement is now a snuggly wellness choice, and everyone from Beyoncé to Will.i.am (#VGANG) are cosying up. I have nothing against being kind to animals, but I am never immune to fashion. Did I mention I thought going vegan would help me lose six pounds? There was that, too.

Veganuary is a thing, and so is Vegandale, more commonly known as Toronto’s Parkdale. Hogtown’s looking like Plantown, wrote the Star’s Karon Liu last month: Plant-based dining has taken hold of this city like a Blue Jays winning streak, just more common. Planta restaurant at Bay and Bloor will serve you a Habibi salad for $18.50 from its environmentally sustainable menu (a second Planta is due soon, at the former Nota Bene). Kupfert and Kim (meatless, wheatless) has three walk-by spots for office workers looking for a quick vegan fix; Rosalinda fuels the financial district with Mexican vegan. A&W’s mung bean and beet burger sold out across Canada after it launched in July, although I’m not sure Pizza Pizza’s vegan option can claim the same success (if anyone has found an edible vegan cheese, I beg you, email me). My siblings and I were kept in bologna and hot dogs by Maple Leaf Foods throughout our growing years. Now the company is lining grocery shelves with vegan sausages. And Toronto isn’t the only one: Parisians are lining up for vegan pain au chocolat at VG Patisserie on Boulevard Voltaire.

Meat may be going the way of the czars. Liu reports: “In 150 years we might see meat as more of a treat, like champagne.”

But here’s the social rub: Being food forward is still not considered an acceptable reason to inconvenience a dinner host. They will resent you for making them cook a whole second menu. They will scoff at fashion, and make you want to abandon the Purity of Veganism. But do not falter, because there are other, less discussed moments of enlightenment waiting for those willing to forgo many delicious foods. So, so many delicious foods.

Here are seven of them:

No. 1: People under forty are nice. They are your new best friends.

When I tell 20- or 30-year-olds, such as most of my work colleagues, that I am now vegan they bring in delicious treats: a strawberry fruit roll-up made by Andres’ mother-in-law; a fresh dill and tofu cream spread by Angela’s wife Holly; even vegan cookbooks such as the Canadian bestseller Oh She Glows, offered up by Laura, who is a walking OSG advertisement, so luminous is her complexion. Canadians under 35 are three times more likely to be vegetarians or vegans than people 49 or older, a recent survey out of Halifax reported.

This generation, it’s nothing new to say, takes their food seriously. When I worked on the fourth floor of the Star a coffee area that used to have actual coffee instead housed personal blenders, glass canning jars, juicers and nut milk bags. There was a lot of whirring going on. My own under-40 often-vegan gang on the fifth floor eat — I think constantly? Massive degradable bowls arrive mid-afternoon via Foodora for lunch. An hour later their own Tupperware comes out, brimming with bright green chopped food, for second lunch, followed by pre-dinner sushi from across the road. Plus continuous communal snacking on sacks of fresh pistachios. Healthy eaters may be pure, but they are always ravenous.

When I tell my generation about my new-found fondness for nuts and seeds, on the other hand, people say, “Why, Cathrin?” in the same tone they might use if I had drowned a litter of poodle pups. And then come the slurs.

Some are directed globally, at all vegans. “No protein makes you judgmental.” “It may be climatologically sound, but if we have to go vegan to save the Earth, is it worth it?” “Instead of vegan, they should just call it bloat. I am a bloat.”

Some slights are more personal. “You don’t even know how to cook normal food.” “Snacks at your house used to be way more fun.” (I admit that pureed pulses have nothing on bacon-wrapped wieners. But the price of dietary virtue is less pleasure for everyone.) “Learn how to pronounce the word.” (I say vegan with a soft e, as in Meghan Markle, a fellow vegan. This is what the spelling suggests. We don’t say VEEgetarian, do we?) An over-40 co-worker has taken to muttering under his breath when we pass in the hall, “Picky eater.”

No. 2: Be careful up there on that high horse of dietary superiority. It can be a rough, self-questioning ride.

I have a niggling memory of saying to my daughter Mary a few years back that she could marry anyone but a vegan. When author and journalist David Macfarlane announced his own veganism before a weekend of hearty meals at a cabin with good friends a couple of years back, I was aghast. “What are we supposed to barbecue, carrots?” David wrote about his ethical veganism in a funny and compelling piece for The United Church Observer in 2016 called, “Are vegans right?” In it, he turned his Christian cheek to his detractors, behaviour as mysterious to me as Google’s algorithm: My Catholic God flings lightning bolts at hapless scoffers. Although I have since apologized to David. He accepted both the anger and the apology with benign equanimity. He was raised United, after all.

Like most nursery rhymes, the sweet ditty covers an explosive truth. “What a gas!” became my standard thank you note after a vegan dinner party. One friend said she understood how Neil Armstrong felt when she had liftoff from her bed following a dinner party of roasted sweet potatoes, cauliflower hummus, chickpea stew and massaged kale salad with pecan Parmesan.

No. 4: Speaking of dinner parties, here’s a tip on how to tell your host that you are now vegan.

There is no tip! Let’s say you don’t tell her, so as not to put her to the trouble of cooking vegan because you can eat around any menu. WRONG. This is extremely thoughtless after she has spent the day cooking a delicious (smelling) scallop-packed bouillabaisse for you.

Let’s say you tell her mere hours before you arrive, in a delicately timed effort to curtail her extra work. WRONG AGAIN. She now must rush around finding nuts and hummus in addition to her day of cooking for you.

Let’s say you don’t tell her, stuff your face with rapini beforehand, and feign a vague ailment over dinner that only a bottle of Chablis can cure. Possibly. I haven’t tried that yet.

You give her fair warning the moment you are invited, days or weeks in advance. This is actually the only correct course, but it is not painless. Email chains suddenly overflow with witticisms like, “We’re having poached salmon and there is a turnip for Cathrin.” Then everyone weighs in with something even funnier. If that is possible.

There is no right way to break the news. People will be irked. Your best hope is to be a charming and self-deprecating guest, and try to move the topic from tofu to Trump. This generally works.

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No. 5: While we’re on the subject of Trump, vegans have discovered the cure for the endless, circular conversations about his latest tweets that now ruin most social gatherings.

Dining with vegans there is only one conversation, and that is what it is like being vegan. Try to turn the talk away from eggplant meatballs and toward sex in the 60s (age, not decade), and fail. There is nothing more compelling to talk about than Parmesan made with nutritional yeast. Nothing.

No. 6: There will be low points. There will be utter blackness.

The friend who called me a drip had spent five minutes listening to me complain dolorously about how much I wanted an egg salad sandwich for lunch. If the devil had asked me if I wanted an egg salad sandwich for lunch or love and happiness forever, I would have taken the sandwich, on white, with crispy iceberg lettuce. A moment like this can take you right down to the existential futility of the universe.

Rewards help. Mine was the Breville Sous Chef Peel and Dice Food Processor with a precise cut that leads to “consistent sizes and textures making every dish tastier and more flavoursome.” It features three chute sizes and a multi-tasking “S blade system,” for peeling and whatever.

Ignoring Amazon’s recommendation that the Sous Chef was best for actual chefs, a week later a box (price tag: $656 in relinquished sirloin steaks) as big as me was dropped at my front door. The blender is so tall I stand on a stool to stuff it with hearts of celery. I think of it fondly sometimes before I fall asleep, in my happy place.

No. 7: Try and figure out the reason why you are going vegan, maybe sooner than I did.

The more people rolled their eyes at my veganity, the more I realized: I like giving things up.

I was once an avid student of Lent, the 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday designed to prepare Catholics for the resurrection of Christ through prayer, penance and “mortifying of the flesh” — in my case, six weeks without candy or TV. I got hooked on the spiritual/practical combo punch: my pure, whitewashed soul; and my reduced purgatory time, something like a week per candy-free day.

I stopped being Catholic but kept giving things up. Taxis, Starbucks, wine, Netflix. Three years ago, I went on a clothes shopping fast for a year. I should mention that I like to shop for clothes, really a lot. But when it was over I changed my shopping habits pretty drastically. I shop with intention now, not to fill the gaping void of existence, and much less frequently. Not shopping taught me a lot about shopping.

“So being a vegan, it’s a course correction,” said the host who had sweetly put out the nuts and hummus and who was now listening kindly to my explanation.

“Yes,” I said. “A course correction.”

But even this handy course correction idea isn’t going to convert me to permanent veganism, or even get me through the holiday season. A creed based solely on denial is for dilettantes and saints. Who wants either of those over for dinner? By month three I had begun to cast about for a more important reason to give up devilled eggs and chicken braised in red wine for good. And there it was: The End of the World. Perhaps I should have mentioned this sooner.

On Oct. 8, the UN dropped its mind-blowing report on climate change: 700 pages, 6,000 studies, 195 governments. Saying that world citizens urgently need to alter the way we move, work, house and — relevant here — eat. The report recommends each of us consume between 75 per cent and 90 per cent less meat, half the number of eggs, and three times the number of beans, nuts and seeds. Or watch our climate collapse in the next 12 years.

Vegans and vegetarians who changed their diet for moral reasons have been saying this all along — that giving up meat and dairy to save our planet and be kind to animals is an important and even a crucial choice. I haven’t been listening, and I’m sorry about that. I am listening now.

Even if I don’t have what it takes to be a pure vegan, treating meat as champagne is worth it — to help the Earth and to consume an animal that hasn’t been raised in over-fattened, short-lifed terror. (I can’t help but think an animal so raised must also terrorize our own souls, after we ingest them, and make us anxious and sad?) It won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap. A heritage turkey can sell for upwards of $150. Which is a lot of money. Finding farmers near me who raise their pigs and cows conscientiously will take study and effort. It will take longer to find ethically sourced yogurt, or to make my own. Satisfaction of every appetite comes at a cost. Maybe we don’t deserve as much as we think we do. And maybe it will be easier — and less dilettantish and flimsy as a cause — if we take this steady path toward veganism together.

This has already happened, for me. Because here is what those pals of mine have done. Sure, they might make fun of me, and sneak a piece of shaved Parmesan onto my plate if I leave the table for a minute. But mostly they now make abundant, ambitious and generous vegan dishes when I or other vegans come over — a great bounty of delicious and welcoming food. It turns out being vegan isn’t about giving things up, and saving your own soul. It’s about ending up with more than you imagined.

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